In a recent survey conducted by the American Psychological Association, more than three-quarters of adults (79%) in the US revealed they experience stress due to the possibility of a mass shooting. Additionally, one in three adults (32%) said they could not go anywhere without worrying about being a victim of a mass shooting. This threat and other forms of violent crime can often lead to significant uncertainties and personal anxiety around participating in certain types of activities or when visiting gathering locations.
Similar risk-related anxieties have sharply increased in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the significant impact on individual health. The resultant uncertainty from COVID-19 has been especially dramatic in relation to travel and fast-changing health risk dynamics across domestic and international destinations.
Against this evolving backdrop, travelers are now seeking more guided cultural experiences, where safety and security are a priority. And that’s precisely why pre-departure planning and accurate awareness of destination risks are crucial to ensure resiliency and wellness during leisure or business travel.
Unfortunately, existing travel risk intelligence (TRI) products and services offer poor risk visibility as they derive from anecdotes, arbitrary scales, and liability reduction concerns that can lead to inaccurate assessments and decisions.
Technology startup Safe-esteem is leading the travel risk digital transformation with tools that improve safety awareness and personal resiliency. Safe-xplore Personal Edition is a new Web and mobile app that offers accurate and personalized risk ratings that enable users to make confident decisions at home or while traveling.
As travel resumes in 2022 and the COVID-19 pandemic gradually eases, sentiment data gathered in partnership with Ipsos MORI from more than 10,000 adults aged 18-75 in five countries indicates a majority of respondents are indeed planning to hit the road again within their own country or overseas.
But when trying to make wise travel decisions, most people find themselves in a dilemma because of foggy or inaccurate perceptions about the potential risks that might cause them harm. This can lead to fear, anxiety, and poor everyday decisions. Thankfully, two industry veterans have taken the baton to develop Safe-xplore, a revolutionary personal and travel risk tool originally designed for corporate executive protection and intelligence teams securing Fortune 500 CEOs and key executives.
Safe-xplore Personal Edition is a free mobile app for the public. For the first time, any user can now have access to the same data and information developed to ensure the safety of top CEOs and Ultra High Net Worth individuals.
How is SXPE different from other Travel Risk Intelligence platforms?
Safe-xplore’s Personal Edition is the most accurate and personalized risk rating platform available to date, with age and gender-specific data mapped for over 200 cities in the US, 180 global cities, and thousands of sub-national regions. Additionally, Safe-xplore provides age-gender-specific COVID-19 risk estimates for nearest-available geographic regions updated daily for over 2500 US counties and 160+ nations. When it comes to risk mitigation, personalized data and insights are more critical than ever, with the increasing appreciation that a 22-year-old male traveler, for example, has an entirely different personal risk & safety profile than a 55-year-old female.
Safe-xplore makes information available in an easy-to-use format. It provides relevant hyper-local risk data, along with critical safety alerts, tips, and best practices to promote improved safety awareness, resiliency, and wellness. The app leverages Big Data analytics, proprietary algorithms, and interface design based on current cognitive-behavioral research to measure and communicate personal risks more effectively. Users get, for example, real-time access to personalized COVID-19 metrics anywhere in the world and can easily compare those risks with other diseases or compare a destination’s violent crime victimization risk to those in their home city.
Filippo Marino, Founder & CEO of Safe-xplore, adds:
“The COVID-19 pandemic has made many people around the world increasingly aware of the motivated reasoning and bias influencing our risk perception, judgment, and decision-making, and more thoughtful about personal risks and safety – be it health, crime, or accidents. The first and the most effective step to make safer and smarter risk decisions is to ‘calibrate’ our judgment of what is likely to injure or even kill us. This turns out to be a liberating and empowering exercise, and Safe-xplore is the first app specifically developed to improve what we call safe-esteem.”
Pre-departure planning has now become more critical than ever before. According to the above-cited survey by Ipsos MORI, 17% of Americans currently subscribe to travel-related paid subscription programs or services, and another 23% suggested while they do not currently subscribe to such a service, they would consider doing so in the future. With Safe-xplore’s Personal Edition, users will now be able to calibrate risk perception and judgment in a better way, developing a more acute and realistic awareness of valuable versus useless or even dangerous data or insights.